SOPA/PIPA: My take on it. 2 minutes to read

Below is a video that a bunch of BIG people have blogged about (WordPress, Yoast, and some others). For those not wanting to watch it, it basically describes how PIPA will severely harm internet through domain blacklisting, suing search engines, social networks, hindering startups, and impeding on internet security as well as right of speech under the pretense of “battling pirates” and losing against them once again. The bill will not stop anyone from being able to access a site directly using an IP address (like: 192.168.0.1 which sould be your router) but it will stop anyone from using the domain name.

SOPA functions in a similar fashion where sites will be taken down and the burden of proof of innocence will be shifted to the site-owner. An entertainment company can allege copyright infringement and your site will go down until you battle it through courts. Can you imagine how many online business will fail this way?

People from Reddit, Tumblr, and other social networks that often discuss “entertainment” will be under attack as well and will require filtering lest they be sued for millions, and possibly taken down. Just look through your tumblr feed, how many references to movies, books, music are there? Imagine a clip from Star Wars bringing down the entire website. And who’s to say it’s infringement? There are laws about what’s considered “illegal infringement” and “legal infringement” but this bill will basically cripple you just in case you’re doing something potentially illegal. Yay -.-

I watched some of the congress proceedings and it’s laughable. You can see the politicians are just wanting to gain favor, money, or simply power. It’s a huge bill, once it passes, it’ll take a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and many of your favorite websites burning down just to reverse it, so pay attention, yeah?

On top of that, US is known to enforce its ideas of copyright on other countries and thus the bill will probably spread. It even threatened to blacklist Spain for not passing a copyright infringement bill akin to SOPA

It’s interesting how this bill gives unfair advantage to the richest while killing the rights of the poorest in a way. Actually you know what? Unless you’re way up above, somewhere where Time Warner, UMG, and even NBC, you stand little to no chance of surviving this bill. Remember that.